Many substances may be delivered to the digestive tract through the use of tablets. These tablets can include any number of ingredients including nutritional substances, pharmaceuticals, vitamins, herbs, etc. These ingredients can be incorporated into tablets through the use of a tablet press. Tablet presses take large volume amounts of these ingredients and compress them into a much denser tablet form.
The compressive forces from the tablet press can cause a significant increase in the temperature of the tablet ingredients. Many of the tablet ingredients are temperature sensitive. Thus the increase in temperature due to tablet compression may result in decreased potency of the tablet ingredients.
To achieve an end product tablet with desired potency, current tablet processes will use large excesses of beginning material. The necessity of including this excess material, to overcome the losses due to temperature sensitivity, increases the cost of production due to the amount of substance used to make the tablet, and due to the increased volume of material that the processing equipment must handle.
Refrigeration and freeze drying are known for the protection of food products (such as meat) from contaminants and to keep the food fresh. However, this type of processing is done to prevent the normal degradation that food goes through at ambient temperature. This type of processing does not address the issue of the decrease in potency of tablet ingredients due to processing conditions.